In March, 2009, the NIH announced the availability of funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) for project expansions via competitive revisions (NOT-OD-09-058) and administrative supplements (NOT-OD-09-056), including administrative supplements providing summer research experiences for students and science educators (NOT-OD-09-060).

This Notice serves to clarify that requests in response to the Notices cited above may be made in excess of programmatic cost limitations or ceilings associated with a program or activity code (e.g., direct costs stipulated for Small Research Grants [R03], Exploratory/Developmental Grants [R21]).

If a project was previously funded under a program or activity code with budget limitations or ceilings, these limitations or ceilings are not applicable to ARRA competitive revision and/or administrative supplement requests. Note: All budget requests must be commensurate with the scope of the programmatic request and will be subject to a cost analysis prior to award. In addition, budgets submitted in competing revisions will be subject to the peer review.

Concerning modular budgets and competitive revision applications, the modular grant concept applies. Therefore, for electronic submissions, budget requests for competitive revisions equal to or less than $250,000 direct costs per year must still use a modular budget component; requests over $250,000 direct costs per year must use the detailed budget component. (For paper PHS 398 applications (e.g., P01), a detailed budget is always required.) Please note the flexibility to switch from a modular to a detailed budget is only available for those Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) where both the detailed budget and modular budget components are part of the application package. (For FOAs where only the modular budget component is available (e.g., SC1, SC2, SC3) competitive revisions will be submitted using the modular format for no more than $250,000 direct costs per year.) Note that this flexibility to switch from a modular budget to a detailed budget only applies to ARRA competing revision requests and is not a change in our general practice.

Institutions and Project Directors/Principal Investigators should be aware that they will receive a validation warning when submitting a competitive revision through Grants.gov if the parent application was submitted using a modular budget and they are now submitting a detailed budget. The warning will read: “The parent grant for this revision uses the modular format; in most cases, this application must be submitted with a modular budget. If the budget caps permitted by the FOA exceed the modular limit of $250k, the application must be submitted with a detailed budget”. Please disregard this warning. It will not affect submission of the application through Grants.gov.